This book argues that language and literature actively produced chance in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries by categorizing injuries and losses as innocent of design. Automobile ...
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This book argues that language and literature actively produced chance in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries by categorizing injuries and losses as innocent of design. Automobile collisions and occupational injuries became “car accidents” and “industrial accidents.” During the post-Civil War period of racial, ethnic, and class-based hostility, chance was an abstract enemy against which society might unite. By producing chance, novels by William Dean Howells, Stephen Crane, Anna Katharine Green, Edith Wharton, Theodore Dreiser, and James Cain documented and helped establish new modes of collective interdependence. Chance here is connected not with the competitive individualism of the Gilded Age, but with important progressive and social democratic reforms, including developments in insurance, which had long employed accident narratives to shape its own “mutual society.” This book reveals the extent to which American collectivity has depended—and continues to depend—on the literary production of chance.Less

Accident Society : Fiction, Collectivity, and the Production of Chance

Jason Puskar

Published in print: 2012-01-11

This book argues that language and literature actively produced chance in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries by categorizing injuries and losses as innocent of design. Automobile collisions and occupational injuries became “car accidents” and “industrial accidents.” During the post-Civil War period of racial, ethnic, and class-based hostility, chance was an abstract enemy against which society might unite. By producing chance, novels by William Dean Howells, Stephen Crane, Anna Katharine Green, Edith Wharton, Theodore Dreiser, and James Cain documented and helped establish new modes of collective interdependence. Chance here is connected not with the competitive individualism of the Gilded Age, but with important progressive and social democratic reforms, including developments in insurance, which had long employed accident narratives to shape its own “mutual society.” This book reveals the extent to which American collectivity has depended—and continues to depend—on the literary production of chance.

Over the course of the last two decades, novelist Karen Tei Yamashita has reshaped the Asian American literary imagination in profound ways, and this book offers readers a critically engaged ...
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Over the course of the last two decades, novelist Karen Tei Yamashita has reshaped the Asian American literary imagination in profound ways, and this book offers readers a critically engaged examination of her literary corpus. Crafted at the intersection of intellectual history, ethnic studies, literary analysis, and critical theory, the study goes beyond textual investigation to intervene in larger debates over postmodern representation, spatial materialism, historical form, and social and academic activism. Arguing that Yamashita's most important contribution is her incorporation of a North–South vector into the East–West conceptual paradigm, the author highlights the novelist's re-prioritization, through such a geographical realignment, of socio-economic concerns for Asian American literary criticism. In assessing Yamashita's works as such, the author designates her novelistic art as a form of new Asian American literary avant-garde that operates from the peripheries of received histories, aesthetics, and disciplines. Seeking not only to demonstrate the importance of Yamashita's transnational art, the book also sets new terms for ongoing dialogues in Asian American literary and cultural criticism. At the same time, it argues for the continuing relevance of Asian American literature as a self-reflexive and self-renewable critical practice.Less

Across Meridians : History and Figuration in Karen Tei Yamashita's Transnational Novels

Jinqi Ling

Published in print: 2012-04-18

Over the course of the last two decades, novelist Karen Tei Yamashita has reshaped the Asian American literary imagination in profound ways, and this book offers readers a critically engaged examination of her literary corpus. Crafted at the intersection of intellectual history, ethnic studies, literary analysis, and critical theory, the study goes beyond textual investigation to intervene in larger debates over postmodern representation, spatial materialism, historical form, and social and academic activism. Arguing that Yamashita's most important contribution is her incorporation of a North–South vector into the East–West conceptual paradigm, the author highlights the novelist's re-prioritization, through such a geographical realignment, of socio-economic concerns for Asian American literary criticism. In assessing Yamashita's works as such, the author designates her novelistic art as a form of new Asian American literary avant-garde that operates from the peripheries of received histories, aesthetics, and disciplines. Seeking not only to demonstrate the importance of Yamashita's transnational art, the book also sets new terms for ongoing dialogues in Asian American literary and cultural criticism. At the same time, it argues for the continuing relevance of Asian American literature as a self-reflexive and self-renewable critical practice.

The book presents a unique and controversial rethinking of the intersection between modern American democratic theory and free expression. Most free speech scholars view freedom of expression as a ...
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The book presents a unique and controversial rethinking of the intersection between modern American democratic theory and free expression. Most free speech scholars view freedom of expression as a vehicle for fostering democracy. However, most do so by relying upon communitarian, cooperative or collectivist democratic theories. This book reshapes free speech as an outgrowth of adversary democracy, arguing that individuals should have the opportunity to affect the outcomes of collective decision-making according to their own personal values and interests. Adversary democracy recognizes the inevitability of conflict within a democratic society, as well as the need for regulation of the conflict to prevent the onset of tyranny. In doing so, it embraces pluralism, diversity and individual growth and developmentLess

The Adversary First Amendment : Free Expression and the Foundations of American Democracy

Martin H. Redish

Published in print: 2013-06-05

The book presents a unique and controversial rethinking of the intersection between modern American democratic theory and free expression. Most free speech scholars view freedom of expression as a vehicle for fostering democracy. However, most do so by relying upon communitarian, cooperative or collectivist democratic theories. This book reshapes free speech as an outgrowth of adversary democracy, arguing that individuals should have the opportunity to affect the outcomes of collective decision-making according to their own personal values and interests. Adversary democracy recognizes the inevitability of conflict within a democratic society, as well as the need for regulation of the conflict to prevent the onset of tyranny. In doing so, it embraces pluralism, diversity and individual growth and development

This book examines the writings of a motley collection of interwar far-right intellectuals, showing that they defined Frenchness in racial, gendered, and sexual terms. A broad, ambitious cultural and ...
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This book examines the writings of a motley collection of interwar far-right intellectuals, showing that they defined Frenchness in racial, gendered, and sexual terms. A broad, ambitious cultural and intellectual history, the book offers a provocative reinterpretation of a topic that has long been the subject of controversy. In works infused with rhetorics of abjection, disgust, and dissolution, such writers as Maulnier, Brasillach, Céline, and Blanchot imagined the nation through figures deemed illegitimate or inferior—Jews, colonial subjects, homosexuals, women. The author argues that these intellectuals offered an “aesthetics of hate,” reinventing a language of far-right nationalism by appealing to the realm of beauty and the sublime for political solutions. By acknowledging the constitutive relationship of anti-Semitism and colonial racism at the heart of these canonical writers' nationalism, this book makes us rethink how aesthetics and politics function, how race is imagined and defined, how gender structured far-right thought, and how we conceive of French intellectualism and fascism.Less

The Aesthetics of Hate : Far-Right Intellectuals, Antisemitism, and Gender in 1930s France

Sandrine Sanos

Published in print: 2012-10-24

This book examines the writings of a motley collection of interwar far-right intellectuals, showing that they defined Frenchness in racial, gendered, and sexual terms. A broad, ambitious cultural and intellectual history, the book offers a provocative reinterpretation of a topic that has long been the subject of controversy. In works infused with rhetorics of abjection, disgust, and dissolution, such writers as Maulnier, Brasillach, Céline, and Blanchot imagined the nation through figures deemed illegitimate or inferior—Jews, colonial subjects, homosexuals, women. The author argues that these intellectuals offered an “aesthetics of hate,” reinventing a language of far-right nationalism by appealing to the realm of beauty and the sublime for political solutions. By acknowledging the constitutive relationship of anti-Semitism and colonial racism at the heart of these canonical writers' nationalism, this book makes us rethink how aesthetics and politics function, how race is imagined and defined, how gender structured far-right thought, and how we conceive of French intellectualism and fascism.

Many people today place great hope in law as a vehicle for the transformation of society and accept that law is autonomous, universal, and above all, secular. Yet recent scholarship has called into ...
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Many people today place great hope in law as a vehicle for the transformation of society and accept that law is autonomous, universal, and above all, secular. Yet recent scholarship has called into question the simplistic narrative of a separation between law and religion and blurred the boundaries between these two categories, enabling new accounts of their relation that do not necessarily either collapse them together or return law to a religious foundation. This book gives special attention to the secularism of law, exploring how law became secular, the phenomenology of the legal secular, and the challenges that lingering religious formations and other aspects of globalization pose for modern law's self-understanding. Bringing together scholars with a variety of perspectives and orientations, it provides a deeper understanding of the interconnections between law and religion and the unexpected histories and anthropologies of legal secularism in a globalizing modernity.Less

After Secular Law

Published in print: 2011-08-29

Many people today place great hope in law as a vehicle for the transformation of society and accept that law is autonomous, universal, and above all, secular. Yet recent scholarship has called into question the simplistic narrative of a separation between law and religion and blurred the boundaries between these two categories, enabling new accounts of their relation that do not necessarily either collapse them together or return law to a religious foundation. This book gives special attention to the secularism of law, exploring how law became secular, the phenomenology of the legal secular, and the challenges that lingering religious formations and other aspects of globalization pose for modern law's self-understanding. Bringing together scholars with a variety of perspectives and orientations, it provides a deeper understanding of the interconnections between law and religion and the unexpected histories and anthropologies of legal secularism in a globalizing modernity.

The fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 was the beginning of one of the most interesting natural experiments in recent history. The East German transition from a Communist state to part of the Federal ...
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The fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 was the beginning of one of the most interesting natural experiments in recent history. The East German transition from a Communist state to part of the Federal Republic of Germany abruptly created a new social order as old institutions were abolished and new counterparts imported. This unique situation provides an exceptional opportunity to examine the central tenets of life-course sociology. The empirical chapters of this book draw a comprehensive picture of life-course transformation, demonstrating how the combination of life-course dynamics coupled with an extraordinary pace of system change affect individual lives. How much turbulence was created by the transition and how much stability was preserved? How did the qualifications and resources acquired before 1989 influence the fortunes in the restructured economy? How did the privatization and reorganization of firms impact individuals? Did the transformation experiences differ by age/cohort and gender? How stable were social networks at work and in the family? Were personality characteristics important mediators of post-1989 success or failure, or were they rather changed by them? How specific were the East German life trajectories in comparison with those of Poland and West Germany?Less

After the Fall of the Wall : Life Courses in the Transformation of East Germany

Published in print: 2006-09-26

The fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 was the beginning of one of the most interesting natural experiments in recent history. The East German transition from a Communist state to part of the Federal Republic of Germany abruptly created a new social order as old institutions were abolished and new counterparts imported. This unique situation provides an exceptional opportunity to examine the central tenets of life-course sociology. The empirical chapters of this book draw a comprehensive picture of life-course transformation, demonstrating how the combination of life-course dynamics coupled with an extraordinary pace of system change affect individual lives. How much turbulence was created by the transition and how much stability was preserved? How did the qualifications and resources acquired before 1989 influence the fortunes in the restructured economy? How did the privatization and reorganization of firms impact individuals? Did the transformation experiences differ by age/cohort and gender? How stable were social networks at work and in the family? Were personality characteristics important mediators of post-1989 success or failure, or were they rather changed by them? How specific were the East German life trajectories in comparison with those of Poland and West Germany?

More than twenty years have passed since the disintegration of Yugoslavia, a multiethnic country that did not establish nation-states like most of Europe but opted for a confederation. In the 1990s, ...
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More than twenty years have passed since the disintegration of Yugoslavia, a multiethnic country that did not establish nation-states like most of Europe but opted for a confederation. In the 1990s, when the European Union was consolidating and expanding, Yugoslavia was fast dissolving. Scholarship treating the disintegration of Yugoslavia has overlooked the cultural dimension of its collapse. This volume fills that gap by bringing together leading writers and scholars to focus specifically on the dynamics of post-Yugoslav cultural transition. The authors touch upon the topic of dissolution of the common state but move beyond it to consider consequences and repercussions in various cultural fields. Together, the contributions show that while the country has ceased to exist as a political project, it lives on in the individual and collective memory, in a variety of cultural practices, and as a potent legacy.Less

After Yugoslavia : The Cultural Spaces of a Vanished Land

Published in print: 2013-06-12

More than twenty years have passed since the disintegration of Yugoslavia, a multiethnic country that did not establish nation-states like most of Europe but opted for a confederation. In the 1990s, when the European Union was consolidating and expanding, Yugoslavia was fast dissolving. Scholarship treating the disintegration of Yugoslavia has overlooked the cultural dimension of its collapse. This volume fills that gap by bringing together leading writers and scholars to focus specifically on the dynamics of post-Yugoslav cultural transition. The authors touch upon the topic of dissolution of the common state but move beyond it to consider consequences and repercussions in various cultural fields. Together, the contributions show that while the country has ceased to exist as a political project, it lives on in the individual and collective memory, in a variety of cultural practices, and as a potent legacy.

At the end of the nineteenth century and beginning of the twentieth, Japanese fiction pulsed with an urge to render good and evil in ways that evoked dramatic emotions. This book examines four ...
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At the end of the nineteenth century and beginning of the twentieth, Japanese fiction pulsed with an urge to render good and evil in ways that evoked dramatic emotions. This book examines four enormously popular novels from this period by interweaving two threads of argument. Using approaches to melodrama developed in Western literary and film criticism, it first shows how these texts used their binary morality to construct a semblance of moral certainty in a moment of social transformation. The book then examines how the novels responded to a particular set of ideologies of the family, which the Japanese state attempted to use as an instrument of social control. The melodramatic novels of the Meiji period generated a plethora of alternative family models that explored the myriad ways in which human beings could connect in a modernizing culture. The fictional families in these works revealed the ties of the family to the nation, delineated traumatic changes in social hierarchy, and showed the effects of new discourses of gender. These powerful portrayals and the social discourses which surround them reveal that melodrama was a central mode of sensibility in Meiji culture.Less

An Age of Melodrama : Family, Gender, and Social Hierarchy in the Turn-of-the-Century Japanese Novel

Ken K. Ito

Published in print: 2008-09-03

At the end of the nineteenth century and beginning of the twentieth, Japanese fiction pulsed with an urge to render good and evil in ways that evoked dramatic emotions. This book examines four enormously popular novels from this period by interweaving two threads of argument. Using approaches to melodrama developed in Western literary and film criticism, it first shows how these texts used their binary morality to construct a semblance of moral certainty in a moment of social transformation. The book then examines how the novels responded to a particular set of ideologies of the family, which the Japanese state attempted to use as an instrument of social control. The melodramatic novels of the Meiji period generated a plethora of alternative family models that explored the myriad ways in which human beings could connect in a modernizing culture. The fictional families in these works revealed the ties of the family to the nation, delineated traumatic changes in social hierarchy, and showed the effects of new discourses of gender. These powerful portrayals and the social discourses which surround them reveal that melodrama was a central mode of sensibility in Meiji culture.

This book tells the story of modern Greek Jewry as it came under the control of the Kingdom of Greece during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In particular, it deals with the vicissitudes of ...
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This book tells the story of modern Greek Jewry as it came under the control of the Kingdom of Greece during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In particular, it deals with the vicissitudes of those Jews who held Greek citizenship during the interwar and wartime periods. Individual chapters address the participation of Greek and Palestinian Jews in the 1941 fighting with Italy and Germany, the roles of Jews in the Greek Resistance, aid, and rescue attempts, and the problems faced by Jews who returned from the camps and the mountains in the aftermath of the German retreat. The book focuses on the fate of one minority group of Greek citizens during the war and explores various aspects of its relations with the conquerors, the conquered, and concerned bystanders. It contains archival material and interviews with survivors.Less

The Agony of Greek Jews, 1940-1945

Steven B. Bowman

Published in print: 2009-10-07

This book tells the story of modern Greek Jewry as it came under the control of the Kingdom of Greece during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In particular, it deals with the vicissitudes of those Jews who held Greek citizenship during the interwar and wartime periods. Individual chapters address the participation of Greek and Palestinian Jews in the 1941 fighting with Italy and Germany, the roles of Jews in the Greek Resistance, aid, and rescue attempts, and the problems faced by Jews who returned from the camps and the mountains in the aftermath of the German retreat. The book focuses on the fate of one minority group of Greek citizens during the war and explores various aspects of its relations with the conquerors, the conquered, and concerned bystanders. It contains archival material and interviews with survivors.

How can we account, in a rigorous way, for alchemy's ubiquity? We think of alchemy as the transformation of a base material (usually lead) into gold, but “alchemy” is a word in wide circulation in ...
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How can we account, in a rigorous way, for alchemy's ubiquity? We think of alchemy as the transformation of a base material (usually lead) into gold, but “alchemy” is a word in wide circulation in everyday life, often called upon to fulfill a metaphoric duty as the magical transformation of materials. Almost every culture and time has had some form of alchemy. This book looks at alchemy, not at any one particular instance along the historical timeline, not as a practice or theory, not as a mode of redemption, but as a theoretical problem, linked to real gold and real production in the world. What emerges as the least common denominator or “intensive property” of alchemy is ambivalence, the impossible and paradoxical coexistence of two incompatible elements. The book moves from antiquity, through the golden age of alchemy in the Dutch seventeenth century, to conceptual art, to alternative fuels, stopping to think with writers such as Dante, Goethe, Hoffmann, the Grimm Brothers, George Eliot, and Marx. Eclectic and wide-ranging, it considers alchemy in relation to literary and visual theory in a comprehensive way.Less

Alchemical Mercury : A Theory of Ambivalence

Karen Pinkus

Published in print: 2009-11-09

How can we account, in a rigorous way, for alchemy's ubiquity? We think of alchemy as the transformation of a base material (usually lead) into gold, but “alchemy” is a word in wide circulation in everyday life, often called upon to fulfill a metaphoric duty as the magical transformation of materials. Almost every culture and time has had some form of alchemy. This book looks at alchemy, not at any one particular instance along the historical timeline, not as a practice or theory, not as a mode of redemption, but as a theoretical problem, linked to real gold and real production in the world. What emerges as the least common denominator or “intensive property” of alchemy is ambivalence, the impossible and paradoxical coexistence of two incompatible elements. The book moves from antiquity, through the golden age of alchemy in the Dutch seventeenth century, to conceptual art, to alternative fuels, stopping to think with writers such as Dante, Goethe, Hoffmann, the Grimm Brothers, George Eliot, and Marx. Eclectic and wide-ranging, it considers alchemy in relation to literary and visual theory in a comprehensive way.

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